This design history post was written during the Check an early years qualification project’s alpha phase. You can read more about the project and where we are now in our project overview.

An early version of our service start page. The page uses the GOV.UK design system and is titled Check an Early Years qualification. Content on the page shows what the service is for, a green start now button and a Before you start section underneath the start now button

During Sprint 4, we deployed our first end to end prototype of a potential service for checking early years qualifications. This post talks about the approach we took to prototyping and what we were trying to learn through user research.

Research artefacts

In Sprint 3, we used two research artefacts; a mockup of a partial CV and an end of service screen showing what confirmation of a qualification being full and relevant might look like.

The CV was used in user research sessions to help us understand:

  • how managers read CVs, the details they are looking for and the elements that provide confidence
  • what information would instinctively make a manager query the qualification
  • at what point during the recruitment process do managers check a qualification
  • how managers check qualifications in their settings

The end of service page was used to help us understand what information and level of detail is needed for the user to feel confident that they have completed their task.

Our aims for the prototype

Our sprint 4 prototype seeks to fill the gap between CV and end of service. It shows a potential journey through a service so that we can, in user research sessions, follow a journey from a manager receiving a CV through to completing a check on that qualification to determine if it is considered full and relevant.

The prototype is a research artefact rather than a proposed approach. It contains things we know to be sub-optimal in design terms, but that are useful to us in research in eliciting user reaction and understanding some of the challenges in the data. For example, the prototype includes screens where users are shown intentionally complex situations such as:

  • a list of similar qualification names from a single awarding organisation
  • displaying a potentially unwieldy list of awarding organisations
  • a qualification which does not include the qualification level in the name

The prototype allows for both ‘known item’ finding and explorative search, depending on the information available to the participant, for example if they know the awarding organisation for the qualification.

We wanted to understand how these expert users, who are used to having access to the raw data in the form of an Excel spreadsheet in the current service, think about the data, and their own confidence in working with that data. For example, given the choice, would users prefer to directly search the early years qualifications list, or would they gain more confidence by following a guided step-by-step journey through the data.

This is a particular challenge with early years qualifications data, where some qualifications share similar names and the relationship between the awarding organisation (for example City and Guilds, NCFE or Pearson) and the training provider or academic institution (for example a local college) offering the qualification may not be immediately clear.

In research, we’re sharing a link to a Heroku-hosted prototype so the user is able to use the service in something as close to their own working environment as possible.

What we learn from these sessions will help us to not just iterate on this existing prototype but to consider alternative alpha approaches too.